herbal space program

Trajectories pre/post SOI change were pretty messed up in the first few versions, but as far as I can tell they had cleaned that all up pretty well by the latest version. The dV readouts were still pretty much a disaster, but there were mods to cover that if you really needed them.

Objectively, as a person who has spent countless hours of their precious time on this mortal coil playing both games (well, actually ~3000hr/500hr) , I can say that the latest version of KSP2 is no buggier in general terms than just about any version of KSP1 I ever played. It still has super-annoying, why the hell didn't you fix this already "features" all over the place, but as somebody who has at least a basic appreciation of what coding something like this is, those are all things that are easy to fix, like broken windows in a run-down neighborhood. And yes, they surely should have fixed some of those first, like all the stupid map view behavior with maneuver nodes, because those are essential QOL issues for dedicated players, and so generate ire out of all proportion to the difficulty of fixing them. A good product manager would have recognized that immediately and cleared all that sort of low-hanging fruit from the player grievance roster right away. But most of these people clearly hadn't really spent that many hours playing KSP1, so I imagine they were mostly oblivious to all that. ...And just now I went back and looked at some of my earliest posts here, and here's what I had to say in a thread there about part numbers and performance: Same story, different game.

I joined the forum in 2014, and back then KSP1 still had all kinds of bizarre bugs. I still remember coming back from my first Jool5 mission, at least a year after joining, and posting a mission/bug report about how the entire KSC spontaneously blew up as I was trying to land my Laythe spaceplane there. It was met with "yeah, we knew about that one, quit wasting our time!"

I personally don't think the game is doomed, but I suspect we may be waiting quite a while before we see any more meaningful updates. Maybe they'll push out a few bug fixes before the end of June, but then there is likely going to be a protracted process of post mortem evaluation by a skeleton crew, to determine what the prospects are for meaningfully improving engine performance with the current code base and also to evaluate how much more work would be required to get the colony content such as it is ready to go. Depending on the answers to those questions, it may not actually take that much more money to get the game to where it can honestly be represented as both working properly and having a meaningful amount of stuff that the original did not. If that is the case, then I expect that's what we'll get, but even setting aside how long that process will take, they will probably want to wait a while for all this brouhaha to dissipate anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if that ended up being close to another year at least.

I'll admit I'm just repeating what I've read here, so I was not aware of the actual estimates, which are actually somewhat more than I thought. Still, "anemic" is a somewhat subjective term, and that's still only around 10% as many copies as KSP1 sold, so a lot of KSP1 fans have clearly taken a pass until now. And even if it sold 500k copies, as you pointed out they still probably haven't recouped all their development costs yet with that big team. But given KSP1's numbers, there could still be a pretty big latent market out there that is waiting for some actual new content and better performance reports before buying in. Impressions about initial sales notwithstanding, I'm in the camp that says that is not out of the question and might represent a sufficient rationale for them not to just walk away. Others are obviously pretty convinced that won't happen.

Given the anemic sales in EA, they almost certainly lost money, and the notion that this was a deliberate swindle by TT to cash in on vaporware from the start is pretty silly. At worst, they knew after a string of disappointing progress reports that the game would likely never be everything that was promised and that they would probably have a hard time even breaking even on its developments cost, let alone making any kind of actual profit. The half-baked EA release was probably more a finger in the air to see how many people were even still interested in buying the game than it was a deliberate attempt to rip people off. Unfortunately, the answer they got was a resounding Bronx cheer, and even the arguably much better game that was represented by the FS update did very little to resuscitate sales. At that point, they probably decided that this thing was a dyed-in-the-wool turkey and would never turn a profit, at least if they stuck with the slow, bloated, mismanaged, and technically underqualified team they had. Even with all that, I still have some hope that they might try down the road to put the title in the hands of some kind of pared down team of fixers who are expert in physics engines, to see if they can get it working well enough to support a bunch of colonies content that is likely already waiting in the wings. Then they'll slap a 1.0 on it and hope that modders will come along to fill in enough missing parts to make the stock game more worth buying. Interstellar and multiplayer will probably go by the board entirely unless a whole lot more people buy in on a colonies-only 1.0, and then I imagine they would be rolled out as DLC.

I maintain that KSP1 appealed so much to a broad spectrum of smart and capable STEM people, as is undeniably evidenced by all its incredible mod content, precisely because it forced them to figure out stuff like that for themselves. For me at least, the satisfaction of pulling off something really difficult in the game through my own dogged, amateurish analytical efforts far outweighed anything I might have felt if l had been led to those things by the nose. YMMV, but in the immortal words of John F. Kerman, we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard!

I used KER as well, mostly to document challenges. I just don't see how all that extra info was really required to play the game. I think what HarvesteR wanted to preserve was that adventurous seat-of-the-pants Jeb energy, where you never knew exactly what was going to happen, and didn't want to let players readily reduce it all to a straightforward engineering problem. KER and McJeb (to different extents) pulled back too much of the curtain in front of the wizard to maintain that feel, so he didn't want to put all that in stock. One place I think they went too far with that is the navball only telling you your altitude with respect to ASL and not with respect to the ground. That made landing safely a whole lot trickier than I think it should have been. But in general, I can't fault him for wanting to maintain an aura of mystery around some of those things. And of course those aids were always there if you really wanted them.

I'm not an engineer, but I must say that I didn't find creating a spreadsheet for doing dV calculations particularly difficult, although readouts in the engineering report of both wet and dry mass for different stages would have been really nice. As to relative velocities, I'm not sure what you're referring to. We got those in the map interface at our target orbital intercept points and also on the navball when within ~50km of the target. Where else would you have wanted them?

I started clamoring for more of that in KSP1 probably six years ago already, and I was really happy to see some significant moves in that direction with KSP2. Driving around the complex, challenging terrain around the Duna monument and Stargazer Point in a rover, and then enjoying the artful rendering of the monuments while ruminating on the meaning of the cryptic clues they held was some of the most fun I had in my ~500 hours of playing KSP2. A lot more of the same, with the sequential mission goals eventually creating a trail to some required new tech for colonies/interstellar would probably have kept me happily playing the game for hundreds of hours more.

Towards the end, he got asked if he would want to try to create a KSP1 successor, and if so, what would he have done differently. His first answer was no, he did not want to do that, because the way he described the process of birthing KSP1 you got the idea it nearly killed him, and he did not want to go through such an ordeal again. After saying that, he remarked that if he were them, one thing he would definitely never have done is to start by trying to create a feature-complete upgrade of the original game, because that is a very high bar to reach without actually creating any kind of really new content that would represent a novel sort of hook. He then said that what he would have done in their shoes (and actually pitched unsuccessfully to Squad) would have been to create an aviation-based prequel rather than a sequel. If constrained to make a sequel however, he would have started by building out the colony mechanics without actual spaceflight simulation, and would only then have tried to incorporate all the KSP1 flight simulation elements. Not quite sure how he would have managed that exactly, but I think he did make an excellent point that implies they set themselves up to fail with the approach they actually took. His philosophical statement about a good new gameplay hook being the first and most important foundational element, from which everything else ought to grow organically, also showed IMO that he apparently understands marketing games to folks like us better than all the suits at TT put together. Lastly, he tacitly admitted that the source code he and his team put together for KSP1 was basically the product of a years long, pedal-to-the-metal hackathon, and fell so far short of industry standards for portability that it would likely have been of little use to even his own team, much less a new one. So anyway, I think he did touch upon your question in various ways, although perhaps not quite explicitly.

I think he actually addressed that pretty clearly, although not in response to exactly that question.

Thank you for posting that! His POV definitely makes it easier to see how we might have ended up here.

Roger that! I basically have to tear everything down now and rebuild it mid-game because it's all too dern crowded. At first it seems only logical to put everything so close together, but all too soon the folly of that layout becomes evident. Remember that you have to sleep at some point too!

I agree in principle, but I might have to make an exception for Civ VII if that ever drops. That's the problem when these companies get so big -- they gain control over so many things it becomes really hard to boycott them.

I figured out how to deal with those pretty quickly, but there's also a lot of ways you can paint yourself into corners that then take a really large amount of tedious reworking to get out of. I guess it does share that with KSP as well, so folks with the patience to master that learning curve are likely pre-selected to deal with the same thing in Factorio. Still, I'm not looking forward to all the deconstruction and rebuilding I'm going to have to do in my current (first) game because I lacked the foresight to put enough space between all of my production lines! It definitely helps to avail oneself of a good amount of tutorial material before getting in too deep if one lacks the patience for all those time-consuming do-overs.

A totally fair point in both instances, and indeed perhaps just what the KSP franchise might need to give it new life. I'm actually having a ball playing Factorio right now, so I don't object to introducing such elements in principle. Still I think if poorly implemented it could alienate the player base even more.

Factorio is every bit as addictive as KSP1 was in my book. It appeals to exactly the same sort of creative problem-solving mentality and has exactly the same sort of whoops-it's-3am immersiveness. One of the best values for your gaming dollar ever if you are that sort of person.

As a fairly new player of Factorio, I can see how it shares both the brilliance of its initial concept with KSP1 and the conceptual difficulty of making a sequel to it that will provide new content that is equally engaging. Both games did one thing extremely well, but how to add to that with the same level of immersive magic is by no means clear to me. A lot of people around here expressed a lot of excitement about colonies and/or interstellar, but for my part I was having significant trepidation about how these additions might clash with various aspects of the original game to the point where the magic is gone for me. And that's not a problem you can blame on the developers or the execs at TT, it's the fundamental, harsh reality that some great movies actually don't have plausible sequels.

Maybe they've come to the conclusion that they don't need that 70-person team anymore, because the a lot of the relatively easy-to-implement content they were working on is there already, but the core simulation code is still a disaster. In that case, it's not a question of how many people you employ on the project, but rather who (if anyone) you can find to take on the problem of fixing it. The people in that role at IG were apparently both unequal to that task and in denial (or worse, engaging in deception) about how serious of a problem they had on their hands wrt bugs and performance. It might be that if they scour their no doubt deep bench of recently acquired technical geeks, TT can find that special individual who can handle this unglamorous but essential foundation work, and let them and a small team of subordinates toil away in their cave for a number of months without fanfare to see if they can clean up the mess left behind by the apparently empty Aloha shirts who were in charge of this at IG. That would not cost them so much to do, and I do believe that if they could get to some more or less properly functioning version of the colonies/interstellar part, they might find a whole bunch of previously reluctant takers coming out of the woodwork to pony up their portraits of Ulysses S. Grant. Of course that's a big if, and there's also the peril that colonies/interstellar will fall flat because it will turn off a lot of the fanbase by abandoning the core hook of KSP (building and flying spacecraft) in favor of a more Factorio-like model of resource extraction and automation. Anyway, who knows? But I stand by my assertion that they are not constrained only to the options of continuing with this big, expensive team or scrapping the whole thing.

I don't dispute what the fundamental problem with the game is, and I have myself invoked the house metaphor when talking about it here, but I don't think it really quite translates to that extent. That is, I would expect that they wouldn't really need to rewrite so much of what is on top of that bad foundation in order to fix it, they might just need to bring in somebody who works at a lower level of coding than most of the programmers involved in projects like this, and moreover has the skills required to ferret out various sources of wasted clock cycles in that low-level view.

I think that's probably the answer. They're not telling us what they mean to do because they don't know yet themselves. And figuring out whether or not the game engine is fixable without just starting over is probably not something they can exactly do overnight either. Somebody with a great deal of knowledge is going to have to spend a significant amount of time going through reams of code to make that determination, and then there will have to be some kind of process of decision making based on those findings. Unless of course they really just mean to bin the whole thing and walk away, in which case they might just be mulling the legal ramifications of that move, but I'm still hopeful that they'll try to put a new, smaller team on the project of seeing if they can make the game work better before investing in any staff to create more content. That probably won't happen very quickly, but if it does happen I suspect they actually have a lot of content already that was nearly good to go but for the fact that it would have unacceptably tanked performance if they had tried to roll it out with the core game as it is now. They must have been doing SOMETHING during all those years!

TBH, I'm not sure most of the nitty gritty source code would represent much of an improvement. I think if indeed the game is dead, it died because they failed after multiple attempts to upgrade the physics engine enough to make all these grandiose future plans about colonies, etc. feasible. What may still have a lot of value however is all the nice art and terrain maps they created while the more technical side of the team was struggling with the nuts and bolts. I'd bet there's a whole lot of that which never saw the light of day because other elements were holding up its release.

A fair point, but that is something that could readily be tweaked without much in the way of additional development. I think the large disparity between the rewards for run-of-the-mill science and those for the marquee missions was also not particularly well-conceived, but again that could easily be adjusted without writing a lot of new code.

For me that was a really significant improvement over KSP1. The terrain in KSP1 was just so bland and boring that it never felt like there was any point in exploring any of the bodies in more depth. It was just more of the same in every direction. In KSP2 OTOH, there was some actual complexity to the terrain that made driving around in a rover a whole lot more interesting than it ever was in KSP1. I was genuinely jazzed about that after playing through some of the landmark-tagging missions in FS, anticipating that there would be a whole lot more of that kind of engaging terrain detail in the final version.